Thomas William Pearson

THOMAS PEARSON, University of Wisconsin, Stout, Wisconsin, was approved funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Confronting the ‘Forever Chemical’: Community Responses to PFAS Contamination.” This project examined the social experience of PFAS contamination across multiple sites and at different stages of response to its discovery. PFAS designates a large class of synthetic chemicals invented in the 1940s and used over many decades in numerous industries and consumer products. They are toxic and now considered a source of widespread pollution, found in waterbodies and human bodies around the world. Anchored in two “epicenters” of the global PFAS pollution crisis, including around the 3M Company headquarters in Washington County, Minnesota and the DuPont (now Chemours) Washington Works factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia, this project traced the industrial history of PFAS and examined the social and political “detonation” of PFAS as an emergent environmental health and regulatory issue. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in recently discovered contaminated communities in Wisconsin and Michigan further explored the unfolding social and cultural dimensions of PFAS toxicity, including how people cope with, assign meaning to, and experience chemical exposure; how PFAS symbolically move from a realm of invisible, unrecognized pollution into public visibility as a highly contested issue; the social factors that shape scientific and regulatory action, inaction, and ignorance; and efforts of impacted communities to mobilize collectively in response to PFAS pollution.